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I'm lookin' at the final season of Alias for the first time (it was $17 at Buymore), and I have to say, WAAAAY better than I expected. Maybe the pregnancy thing was a bad reason to avoid it after all...

Season 5 was an improvement over season 4, which I considered to be a massive disappointment. Although the 5th and final season is shorter, it returned to a more serialized arc that had been lacking for a while. Still, the show doesn't recover fully and never returns to the same quality that it had in seasons 1-2.

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"I managed to find Uno and Checkers, and also parts of Battleship and most of the pieces of Candy Land, which I figure, I can mix together to create a fabulous new game, CandyShipBattleLand. War never tasted so good." - Lorelai Gilmore

The final season is definitely the best since the mid-S2 revamp. In year 5, they finally remembered to make the show fun rather than being ultra-grim and angsty all the time. And bringing in Rachel Nichols was a breath of fresh air -- and reducing Jennifer Garner's presence didn't hurt much.

I never thought Alias got as bad as was made out by a lot of people. I wish more shows had the balls to tell their story and then tell a new one if they feel the show can carry it off rather then stretch out the story till it's stale and boring... Not that it really worked out that way with Alias, but still they seemed to at least try.

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“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
― Terry Pratchett

I bailed on Alias after season 4, and it's very rare for me to bail on a show. It might be more surprising that I abandoned Jennifer Garner, as she's always been a favorite from an eye-candy perspective, and the Aliases kept the eye candy nice and versatile.

I've thought about going back to watch S5 at some point, but I forgot more or less everything about the show... they talk about a guy named Rambaldi a lot..... that's all I got.

I never thought Alias got as bad as was made out by a lot of people. I wish more shows had the balls to tell their story and then tell a new one if they feel the show can carry it off rather then stretch out the story till it's stale and boring... Not that it really worked out that way with Alias, but still they seemed to at least try.

I think they were right to wrap up the initial storyline, because it had gotten stretched past all credibility by that point. Okay, so Sydney finds out she's working for an eevill organization and she has to pretend to keep working for them while actually subverting their efforts on behalf of the CIA. Sure, fine. But what that means is, every single time she was sent on a mission for SD-6, she arranged for it to fail in some way, or to substitute a fake McGuffin for the real one so SD-6 wouldn't get any useful tech or information. So from Arvin Sloane's perspective, every single mission she went on was a failure. So why the hell did he keep sending her on missions???? After a few months of this, tops, he should've decided that she was either a mole or a complete incompetent. It had just become impossible to sustain the original concept any longer. If anything, they dragged it out longer than they should have.

The problem is, they were kind of forced to switch gears midstream by network dictate -- a rare instance where the network's notes were dead on the money -- and since it happened so abruptly, they weren't really able to come up with anything really good to replace the original storyline with. So while ending it was the right thing to do, they were unable to follow it up effectively.

I felt the biggest mistake they made was abandoning the half of the show that was about Sydney trying to live a normal life, having friends and a social life and a facade of normality to balance out the wild, over-the-top spy stuff. I think that was another thing they brought back in season 5, that element of normality to give the show an anchor and provide respite from the larger-than-life action and intrigue.

While I can understand the need to wrap up the initial storyline, I think that was ultimately the biggest mistake the show made. It worked in the short-term, they followed up the fall of SD-6 with the search for Sloane and Evil Francine storyline. But beginning in Season 3, that great storyline (Sydney working behind enemy lines to take down SD-6) was gone and just couldn't be replicated again. I rather would have had three seasons focusing on this storyline than the last three we got. Not that I didn't enjoy the show after Season 2 but it was just never the same.

Writing out Will was another mistake although it worked out great for Bradley Cooper. The two times Will returned to the show, it felt like old times again.

All this Alias talk has prompted me to start watching the series from the beginning again. Watched the pilot last night and will watch a few more tonight. Maybe by the time I get to the end of Season 4, I'll feel the urge to buy Season 5, which I never really felt compelled to do before.

On a side note, I recently saw the re-packaged Season 1 set and was surprised that it was about a third of the size of the original S1 box!

I found season three disappointing (though it has some really great episodes, particularly early on). Four I really liked; five was surprisingly good, though I missed Nadia as a regular presence. The finale mostly managed to wrap things up well (particularly with Jack and Sloane).

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"I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are!"